When the nation’s long-running war against drugs was defined by the crack epidemic and based in poor, predominantly black urban areas, the public response was defined by zero tolerance and stiff prison sentences. But today’s heroin crisis is different. While heroin use has climbed among all demographic groups, it has skyrocketed among whites; nearly 90 percent of those who tried heroin for the first time in the last decade were white.

And the growing army of families of those lost to heroin — many of them in the suburbs and small towns — are now using their influence, anger and grief to cushion the country’s approach to drugs, from altering the language around addiction to prodding government to treat it not as a crime, but as a disease.

I foresee a long, cold winter for objectivity as the New York "Black Lives Matter" Times views every story through this new prism.

But do let me note - it is quite obvious that, forty years into it, the public attitude towards our War on Drugs has changed.

As to the notion that the crack epidemic started this, my goodness, what else do we need to forget? Richard Nixon declared the War on Drugs in the early 1970s. New York's Rockefeller drug laws were passed under - wait for it - Governor Rockefeller in 1973.

And lest you wonder, in the 1970s heroin was a scourge in inner city black communities and there were prominent black leaders, such as Charles Rangel, who were all in favor of tougher drug laws and more vigorous policing.

In March 1971, New York City faced a growing heroin epidemic. That year, Charles Rangel — then just 41 years old — was part of a delegation of newly-elected black congressman who won a closed-door meeting at the White House with President Richard Nixon.

It was a historic moment. Nixon had already begun the process of criminalizing drugs in new ways, ramping up the federal effort to crack down on dealers and addicts. Over the decades that followed, those policies would send millions of young black men to prison. Some African American leaders were already voicing doubts and concerns.

But during the meeting, Rangel didn’t urge Nixon to rethink his drug war strategy. Instead, the Harlem Democrat urged Nixon to ramp up drug-fighting efforts more aggressively, more rapidly.

“We could bring a halt to this condition which is killin off American youth,” Rangel told Nixon.

In their encounter, secretly taped by Nixon’s White House recording system and broadcast here for the first time, Rangel called on Nixon to use America’s military and diplomatic power to stop the importation of drugs.

He urged the the president to view the spread of heroin and cocaine as a “national crisis” and warned that if Nixon didn’t act fast, more Americans would demand that narcotics be legalized.

“It seems to me that more white America is saying, let’s legalize drugs because we can’t deal with the problem,” Rangel cautioned.

...

Rangel would later write warmly of his partnership with Nixon on drug war issues. “Nixon was tough on drugs,” he recalled in his 2007 memoir. “[We] worked closely together on what was the beginning of our international war on drugs.”

In the decade that that followed, Rangel himself emerged as one of the black community's toughest and most persistent voices on drug issues, pushing for more money and manpower for the police, and for more military drug interdiction overseas.

He lobbied for the creation of a special House subcommittee on narcotics and then served as its chairman, using the post to support creation of the Drug Enforcement Agency and a national Drug Czar.

Under his leadership, many members of the Congressional Black Caucus voted in favor of some of the most punitive drug-war era legislation, expanding mandatory minimum sentences, funding more prisons and boosting penalties for crack cocaine.

In a profile in Ebony magazine in 1989, Rangel bragged about pressuring Nixon and President Ronald Reagan to get even tougher on drugs, blasting them for what he called a “lackadaisical attitude.”

Even as questions and doubts about the drug war grew, Rangel wrote editorials mocking the idea of drug decriminalization and describing narcotics as a "genocidal" poison.

It is tricky to track the players without a scorecard but do keep in mind - to some black leaders (e.g., Stokely Carmichael, Ebony June 1970 "Blacks Declare War On Dope") the availability of drugs was a white plot to weaken and enslave the black community and the police role was to look the other way. Locking up the dealers need not be entirely at odds with that, but why bother?

And the Times reviewed a recent book, "‘Black Silent Majority,’ by Michael Javen Fortner, describing black support for tough-on-crime policing. The gist - "Black Lives Matter" notwithstanding, it is not only rightwing pundits that have noticed that the biggest victims of crime are blacks; back in the day many black leaders noticed the same thing.

Is a picture worth a thousand words? From the 1970 Ebony article:

Let me highlight "We are calling for Federal troops, state and local law enforcement forces to move into the streets of Harlem and New York City now and clean it up".

I should add that education and treatment were also emphasized as part of this 1970 black war on drugs.

But today it is all a story of white privilege, racism and indifference. Whatever.

DON'T USE THAT PRIVILEGED LOGIC ON ME... from the Times story I infer that some people think a middle class kid with a family support structure, no criminal record other than the drug use and the financial means to afford rehab should be treated differently from a kid from a violent neighborhood and broken home who is supporting his drug habit by a mix of petty and violent crime. Yeah, go figure.

Meanwhile, this former urban youth was in a drug diversion program until he shot a cop and this nice suburban addict killed his parents and left their bodies hidden in the wilds of Connecticut. Which proves nothing, since anecdotes make for bad policy, but still.

The NY Times notes a major reason the deployment of US Special Forces to Syria was announced yesterday:

The move was meant to bolster diplomatic efforts by Secretary of State John Kerry, who on Friday reached an agreement in Vienna with countries with opposing stakes to explore “a nationwide cease-fire” and ask the United Nations to oversee the revision of the Syrian Constitution and then new elections. The accord represented the first time all the major outside participants had agreed on the start of a political process to bring the war to an end.

I have no doubt the US felt obliged to show our friends and foes that we were still a player in Syria. The irony of John "Army of Ghengis Khan" Kerry being the Secretary of State backing this is inescapable. Obviously Obama is reacting with no real plan and no real commitment. My goodness - just three weeks ago Putin's commitment of Russian resources was described by Obama as a sign of weakness, so what is Obama's troop deployment today? And just as with the "plan" to train and equip rebels outside of Syria, if this latest scheme doesn't work Obama will be the first to disavow it.

We know the Times reporters will hit Kerry with this - how do you ask a man to be the first man to die for a mistake?

AND WHILE WE ARE HERE: The antiwar movement was much more about changing parties than changing policies. Now that we have that charming Nobel Prize Laureate in the White House the antiwar people can sit at home and stick pins in their Dick Cheney dolls. Hillary is OK with the current new deployment and Bernie is not pounding the table against it; I guess the pollsters and focus groupers need a day or two to help them figure out what they think.

October 30, 2015

WASHINGTON — President Obama will deploy a small number of American Special Operations forces to Kurdish-controlled territory in northern Syria, a United States official said.

The team will advise and assist opposition forces who are fighting the Islamic State in Syria, providing smoother and quicker access to equipment and logistical help, the official said.

...

While administration officials plan to characterize the deployment as an enhancement of current strategy, it is actually a huge shift for a president who has said repeatedly that he will not put American combat boots on the ground in Syria.

Let's just stagger down memory lane. This is Obama from Sept 10 2013, when Barry Red Line was explaining the urgency of an "unbelievably small" strike against Assad:

Remarks by the President in Address to the Nation on Syria

...

First, many of you have asked, won’t this put us on a slippery slope to another war? One man wrote to me that we are “still recovering from our involvement in Iraq.” A veteran put it more bluntly: “This nation is sick and tired of war.”

My answer is simple: I will not put American boots on the ground in Syria. I will not pursue an open-ended action like Iraq or Afghanistan. I will not pursue a prolonged air campaign like Libya or Kosovo.

Yeah, well, circumstances change. Here we are on Sept 10, 2014 as Obama explains his strategy to go after ISIS:

But I want the American people to understand how this effort will be different from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. It will not involve American combat troops fighting on foreign soil. This counterterrorism campaign will be waged through a steady, relentless effort to take out ISIL wherever they exist, using our air power and our support for partner forces on the ground.

Whatever. Will the White House announce the deployment of Special Forces to Syria and simultaneously announces their departure date, or have they learned something during these seven long years?

And let's note this silver lining - maybe with US troops embedded alongside them, the Turks (our NATO ally) will be a bit less keen to bomb and shell the Kurds (our ISIS ally). Maybe! That just leaves us worrying about Russian aerial attacks, ISIS troops, Hezbollah, and Qaeda "rebels" hoping to score some US armaments.

October 28, 2015

It's the ongoing "Who Are These Guys - and Gals!?" hosted by CNBC. Also, lets go Mets in the Series, and we have Thunder-Spurs for people who like that sort of thing. Gosh, this will be a real ratings race.

October 26, 2015

If the prospect of cancer isn’t enough to keep you away from hot dogs, maybe the human DNA found amid all that encased-meat goodness will do the trick. As Upton Sinclair once wrote, “[t]here was never the least attention paid to what was cut up for sausage.”

OK, so a recent study conducted by Clear Food found that only 2% of the 345 analyzed hot dogs and sausages actually contained that grim finding. Comforting? Beyond that little stat, though, there are other reasons to be alarmed. In fact, almost 15% of all the hot dogs in the study had problems.

“We encountered a surprising number of substitutions or unexpected ingredients,” the report claimed. “We found evidence of meats not found on labels, an absence of ingredients advertised on labels, and meat in some vegetarian products.”

Of the “meatless” hot dogs tested, 10% included pork or chicken. Yikes.

Well, come on - 98% of hotdogs did not have human DNA. That glass isn't half full, it's damn near overflowing!

On the other hand, the songsays "Buy me some peanuts and crackerjacks". Nothing about hot dogs.

WASHINGTON — Russian submarines and spy ships are aggressively operating near the vital undersea cables that carry almost all global Internet communications, raising concerns among some American military and intelligence officials that the Russians might be planning to attack those lines in times of tension or conflict.

The issue goes beyond old worries during the Cold War that the Russians would tap into the cables — a task American intelligence agencies also mastered decades ago. The alarm today is deeper: The ultimate Russian hack on the United States could involve severing the fiber-optic cables at some of their hardest-to-access locations to halt the instant communications on which the West’s governments, economies and citizens have grown dependent.

Well, it will be an attack but it will be staged as an accident of some sort in order to compound implausible deniability.

While there is no evidence yet of any cable cutting, the concern is part of a growing wariness among senior American and allied military and intelligence officials over the accelerated activity by Russian armed forces around the globe. At the same time, the internal debate in Washington illustrates how the United States is increasingly viewing every Russian move through a lens of deep distrust, reminiscent of relations during the Cold War.

...

“I’m worried every day about what the Russians may be doing,” said Rear Adm. Frederick J. Roegge, commander of the Navy’s submarine fleet in the Pacific, who would not answer questions about possible Russian plans for cutting the undersea cables.

And...

“The level of activity,” a senior European diplomat said, “is comparable to what we saw in the Cold War.”

Yeah, yeah - so said Mitt Romney, to Obama's mockery. And if you are still having trouble getting nervous:

Russia is also building an undersea unmanned drone capable of carrying a small, tactical nuclear weapon to use against harbors or coastal areas, American military and intelligence analysts said.

Admiral Ferguson said that as part of Russia’s emerging doctrine of so-called hybrid warfare, it is increasingly using a mix of conventional force, Special Operations mission and new weapons in the 21st-century battlefield.

“This involves the use of space, cyber, information warfare and hybrid warfare designed to cripple the decision-making cycle of the alliance,” Admiral Ferguson said, referring to NATO. “At sea, their focus is disrupting decision cycles.”

One might think an undersea unmanned drone would be within the technological grasp of a number of countries with commercial ships at sea.

October 24, 2015

The Campus Consent movement is positioning us for a major recalibration of sexual mores. Just to help, let me point out some deplorable examples of "rape culture", which not only fail to incorporate appropriate standards of consent but actually advocate the opposite.

Today's choice to be dropped down the memory hole ASAP: the Academy Award winning "Kiss The Girl" from The Little Mermaid. Who amongst us can read these lyrics and not be appalled?

Yes, yes you want herLook at her, you know you doIts possible she wants you tooThere is one way to ask herIt don't take a wordNot a single wordGo on and kiss the girl (kiss the girl)

That's sexual assault, pal. And what about the children???

Other examples are welcome. I happened to hear a bouncy tune from the 70's that would at one time have been characterized as light and romantic, but now I am wondering whether "Knock Three Times" illustrates creepy stalking:

If you look out your window tonight Pull in the string with the note that's attached to my heart Read how many times I saw you How in my silence I adored you Only in my dreams did that wall between us come apart

June 25, 2015 It was disclosed in June that there were 15 emails between Mrs. Clinton and her longtime adviser Sidney Blumenthal, mainly dealing with events in Libya, that Mrs. Clinton did not provide to the State Department. In response to that development, a Clinton campaign official said, “We do not have a record of other correspondence between her and Mr. Blumenthal beyond that which was turned over to the State Department.” The official added, “We do not recognize many of those materials and cannot speak to their origin.” — The New York Times

...

Analysis

The campaign has not said what happened to these emails. But its failure to turn them over to the State Department has raised questions about whether Mrs. Clinton gave the department all the messages pertaining to her work as the nation’s top diplomat.

Questions have been raised! And answered, obviously - there is no question that not all the relevant emails were turned over. The only question might be, was this some sort of archiving error, or, well, editorial discretion as exercised by Team Clinton?

October 20, 2015

Over A Year Before 9/11, Trump Wrote Of Terror Threat With Remarkable Clarity

“I really am convinced we’re in danger of the sort of terrorist attacks that will make the bombing of the Trade Center look like kids playing with firecrackers.”

In 2000, 19 months before Sept. 11, 2001, Donald Trump wrote extensively of the terrorism threat the United States was facing.

Trump, who at the time was considering a presidential bid on the Reform Party ticket, went so far as to say that an attack on a major U.S. city was not just a probability, but an inevitability.

“I really am convinced we’re in danger of the sort of terrorist attacks that will make the bombing of the Trade Center look like kids playing with firecrackers,” wrote Trump in his 2000 book, The America We Deserve. “No sensible analyst rejects this possibility, and plenty of them, like me, are not wondering if but when it will happen.”

Trump even mentions Osama bin Laden by name, in a criticism of an American foreign policy that too quickly jumps from one crisis to the next.

“One day we’re told that a shadowy figure with no fixed address named Osama bin-Laden is public enemy number one, and U.S. jetfighters lay waste to his camp in Afghanistan,” The Donald wrote. “He escapes back under some rock, and a few news cycles later it’s on to a new enemy and new crisis.”

Well good for him. I think it is fair to say that terrorism was an under-emphasized issue during the 2000 campaign. As an example, this Times coverage of a national security event by then-presumptive nominee Bush focused on nuclear arms and ballistic missile defenses; terrorism was only mentioned in the context of preventing missile strikes by rogue nations such as Iran or North Korea. If Bush was pounding the table on terror, this article missed it.

That said, the idea of a terrorist WMD strike on US soil was hardly original to Trump - Congress had passed and Clinton was implementing a plan to involve the military and National Guard in responding to such scenarios.

Be that as it may, let me note this - Donald Trump was preparing his comments contemporaneously and, we presume, had them reviewed by staffers with relevant expertise. L'il ole me is sitting here fifteen years later (NOT in pajamas!) relying on that most feckless of servants, my memory.

But without even turning to BING I will say that it was not, per Trump, "U.S. jetfighters" that laid waste to Osama's terrorist camp in Afghanistan. The famous attack that just missed Bin Laden was conducted with cruise missiles. Were they launched from jet fighters? I don't believe jet fighters carry the heavyweight cruise missiles, so I will double down and say these cruise missiles were launched from a ship or a sub.

Which leaves me wondering whether Trump can gather and rely on a competent staff. It also leaves me wondering why, instead of warming up some humble pie and perhaps serving it to myself I don't give in and verify my recollections. The Suspense Mounts!

Pentagon sources confirmed to CNN that the attacks were made with cruise missiles, not aircraft. The missiles were fired from ships in the Red Sea and the Arabian Sea. The simultaneous attacks took place about 1:30 p.m. EDT (1730 GMT).

To belabor the obvious, just what did Trump imagine the operating range of jet fighters to be, where did he suppose they flew from, and why would he think that jet fighters, rather than bombers or cruise missiles, would be the weapon of choice for a mission involving terrorist camps deep inside Afghanistan?

October 19, 2015

Will there be a significant Obama machine that survives his none-too-soon departure from the White House, or will we have a full Clinton Restoration? Well might you ask! And the answer depends in part on whether Joe Biden is willing to be an effective stalking goat for Team Obama.

And do let me add - while there is talk of keeping Joe alive there will be hope of a real Justice Department investigation into Hillary's servers. If Joe is not running, that investigation will have nowhere to go other than ruin for the Democratic nominee.

October 18, 2015

[Times reporter] Koblin memorializes Mary Mapes’s Bartlett’s-worthy quote from the Times love-in: “There is a tremendously strong perception that we bungled, bungled, bungled very badly. I think we were within the normal journalistic range of bungle.”

For “bungle” I would read “bias” and “malice,” and then concede Mapes may have been within the normal journalistic range of bungle at CBS News, and among Mapes’s fans at the Times.

If they tackled the NY Times movie review I can't find it. Spoiler Alert - the Times loved the movie and barely alerts the reader to possible problems with the intersection of this film and, well, reality, or at least those small slices that both parties still share.

The title of “Truth,” a gripping, beautifully executed journalistic thriller about the events that ended Dan Rather’s career as a CBS anchorman, should probably be appended with a question mark. More than most docudramas about fairly recent events, it is so well written and acted that it conveys a convincing illusion of veracity.

Just as there are conspiracy theorists who will never be satisfied with the Warren Commission report on the Kennedy assassination, there are some who passionately believe that Mr. Rather and his producer Mary Mapes (Cate Blanchett) conspired to tarnish George W. Bush’s reputation.

Well, wait - are the people may be agnostic about their motivation but believe that CBS ran off the conventional journalistic rails by relying on non-authenticated documents also conspiracy kooks?

The Sept. 8, 2004, episode of “60 Minutes II” alleged that family connections enabled Mr. Bush to avoid the draft in the Vietnam era by serving in the Texas Air National Guard. After Ms. Mapes’s failure to authenticate documents indicating that Mr. Bush, during his term of National Guard service, was lax in his duties and went missing, she was fired, and Mr. Rather stepped down as anchorman.

OK. But...

Their defenders believe that Mr. Rather and Ms. Mapes and her team were fed to the wolves for political reasons. The movie insinuates that CBS, to avoid further embarrassment and to curry favor with conservatives should Mr. Bush win the election, allowed it to happen. “Truth” doesn’t voice an opinion, and none of its characters express their political beliefs even in private. Still, its treatment of Mr. Rather, who exudes the stately aura of a grand old man, and Ms. Mapes, who was a kind of surrogate daughter, makes it perfectly clear whose side it takes.

Yes, and the reviewer makes his side clear as well:

“Truth” which tells Ms. Mapes’s side of the story, is sympathetic, but doesn’t try to exonerate her. Ms. Blanchett, in one of her greatest screen performances, offers a compelling portrait of a driven, high-strung television journalist fearlessly operating in a cutthroat professional climate. She is relentless in tracking down documents that appear to have been written in the early ’70s by Mr. Bush’s commander, Jerry B. Killian, who died in 1984. And when she finally secures an interview with Lt. Col. Bill Burkett (Stacy Keach), an ailing National Guard veteran, who produces incriminating documents that seem to be authentic, her case momentarily seems airtight.

She fearless, she's relentless, and she made a little mistake. A bit later:

Ms. Mapes is the heart and soul of “Truth.” The family breadwinner, she lives in Dallas with her husband, Mark Wrolstad (John Benjamin Hickey), and young son. Ms. Blanchett plays her as fiery-eyed go-getter who pursued the story with a dogged ferocity. Her eyes flashing, she describes a tip linking Mr. Bush to the bin Laden family that went nowhere as “a juicy piece of brisket.”

But she wasn't anti-Bush, you conspiracy kooks.

The screenplay brings in her bitter relationship with her abusive father, whose unkind words about her after the scandal breaks incite savage, profane invective from the right-wing bloggers who call her “feminazi” and “witch.” Ms. Mapes has a thick skin but not so thick that she isn’t wounded by her father’s public scolding and asks him to stop speaking out.

And that is all we hear about savage, profane right-wing bloggers.

The reviewer inadvertently hints at one explanation for the collapse in journalistic standards:

In such a hypercompetitive environment, undercurrents of anxiety and tension of run deep. To combat the stress, a conspicuous amount of alcohol is consumed by both Mr. Rather and Ms. Mapes.

Drunk, stupid and anti-Bush is no way to go through life. But let's not lose sight of our heroes!

“Truth” doesn’t try to resolve mysteries that may never be solved or to drum up paranoia for the sake of extra heartbeats. But it still casts a pall of dread, an ominous sense that people in high places, whether in government or the news media, will stop at almost nothing to protect themselves and their interests. The retaliation against Ms. Mapes and her crew is similar to the smearing of the San Jose Mercury News journalist Gary Webb after his articles about cocaine smuggling and the funding of Nicaraguan rebels by the C.I.A. That story, told in Michael Cuesta’s “Kill the Messenger” (2014), a lesser film than “Truth,” though still a powerful one, sends the same warning. Investigative journalism intended to upset the status quo can be dangerous and costly.

The mysteries are unresolved! And investigative journalism can be dangerous! Especially when people get all nit-picky regarding facts and authenticity.

Meanwhile, we still await the movie on the corporate interests and vested power that shut down NBC News after they aired the 1998 Juanita Broaddrick interview with Lisa Myers alleging Bill Clinton raped her. Of course, NBC waited until after the Senate had declined to convict Clinton, so who knows? And Lisa Myers did step down sixteen years later, so maybe the wheel of vengeance turned slowly. Oh, there I go with the conspiracies again...

After nearly two weeks at the center of a news media storm, Dan Rather and CBS News admitted yesterday that they could not authenticate four documents the network had used to raise new questions about President Bush's Vietnam-era National Guard service and said the news report had been a "mistake in judgment."

Network officials said a former Texas National Guard officer had misled their producers about how he obtained the documents, which came under scrutiny almost as soon as the network broadcast its report on the CBS Evening News and "60 Minutes" on Sept. 8. While CBS stopped short of calling the memos a fraud, it said it could not now say for certain where the documents came from.

"Based on what we now know, CBS News cannot prove that the documents are authentic, which is the only acceptable journalistic standard to justify using them in the report," said Andrew Heyward, the CBS News president.

...

The day's concessions were a sharp turnaround from more than a week ago, when CBS News officials and Mr. Rather, for decades the face of CBS News, were standing steadfastly by the report, dismissing days of accusations from document experts that the records were fakes produced on a modern computer.

Network officials yesterday admitted that the man who gave them the documents had lied about where he got them, and that inconsistencies in the cloak-and-dagger account he gave them in the past few days had left CBS unable to say definitively where they came from. Moreover, CBS was unable to reach the person the man identified as his source, Mr. Rather said .

In an interview broadcast on CBS last night, the former guardsman who gave the memos to the network, Bill Burkett, acknowledged that he had lied. Mr. Burkett told Mr. Rather that he had felt pressure from CBS to reveal his source, and so "simply threw out a name" to explain how he had come by the documents. He insisted he had not forged them.

CBS News said yesterday that the producer of its flawed report about President Bush's National Guard service violated network policy by putting a source in touch with a top aide to Senator John Kerry.

"It is obviously against CBS News standards and those of every other reputable news organization to be associated with any political agenda," the network said in a statement.

The source, wanted to talk strategy with some top people in the Kerry campaign, but no one would take his calls until CBS producer Mary Mapes intervened on his behalf. In an agenda-free way, of course.

Mr. Burkett told USA Today in an interview published yesterday that he had agreed to turn over the documents -- appearing to be from the personal file of Mr. Bush's squadron commander -- if the network would arrange a conversation with the Kerry campaign. CBS officials said they did not believe there was any such deal. But the network said in a statement that it was against its standards "to be associated with any political agenda" and that the matter would be investigated. It also publicly rebuked the "60 Minutes" producer Mary Mapes for putting Mr. Burkett in touch with Mr. Lockhart.

Mr. Burkett has said that the documents were not discussed, and that he wished only to make his case for a more aggressive strategy to defend Mr. Kerry's military service.

A decade has passed and the fog of memory has left the Times confused.

Psychologists who study how the human mind responds to randomness call this the gambler’s fallacy — the belief that on some cosmic plane a run of bad luck creates an imbalance that must ultimately be corrected, a pressure that must be relieved. After several bad rolls, surely the dice are primed to land in a more advantageous way.

The opposite of that is the hot-hand fallacy — the belief that winning streaks, whether in basketball or coin tossing, have a tendency to continue, as if propelled by their own momentum. Both misconceptions are reflections of the brain’s wired-in rejection of the power that randomness holds over our lives. Look deep enough, we instinctively believe, and we may uncover a hidden order.

To which I feel obliged to add - the ability to spot real patterns, such as moon phases, tides, weather cycles, planting cycles, animal migration, feeding and hunting habits was surely vital to the survival of early humans (not to mention other species.)

But, although out of season, we are talking basketball:

Recent studies show how anyone, including scientists, can be fooled by these cognitive biases. A working paper published this summer has caused a stir by proposing that a classic body of research disproving the existence of the hot hand in basketball is flawed by a subtle misperception about randomness. If the analysis is correct, the possibility remains that the hot hand is real.

...

In a study that appeared this summer, Joshua B. Miller and Adam Sanjurjo suggest why the gambler’s fallacy remains so deeply ingrained. Take a fair coin — one as likely to land on heads as tails — and flip it four times. How often was heads followed by another head? In the sequence HHHT, for example, that happened two out of three times — a score of about 67 percent. For HHTH or HHTT, the score is 50 percent.

Altogether there are 16 different ways the coins can fall. I know it sounds crazy but when you average the scores together the answer is not 50-50, as most people would expect, but about 40-60 in favor of tails.

There is an attached table laying out the sixteen alternatives and explaining that calculation. The gist - although there are sixteen possible results for a test sample of four consecutive coin flips, two of them - TTTT and TTTH - are dropped from the analysis due to an insufficiency of heads.

What that implies for an analysis based on longer runs is not explained here. My guess is that the 40-60 ratio he mentions converges towards 50-50, but showing that may complement my afternoon football.

We do hear from one expert:

In an interesting twist, Dr. Miller and Dr. Sanjurjo propose that research claiming to debunk the hot hand in basketball is flawed by the same kind of misperception. Studies by the psychologist Thomas Gilovich and others conclude [LINK] that basketball is no streakier than a coin toss. For a 50 percent shooter, for example, the odds of making a basket are supposed to be no better after a hit — still 50-50. But in a purely random situation, according to the new analysis, a hit would be expected to be followed by another hit less than half the time. Finding 50 percent would actually be evidence in favor of the hot hand. If so, the next step would be to establish the physiological or psychological reasons that make players different from tossed coins.

Dr. Gilovich is withholding judgment. “The larger the sample of data for a given player, the less of an issue this is,” he wrote in an email. “Because our samples were fairly large, I don’t believe this changes the original conclusions about the hot hand. ”

Let's close with the words of wisdom from noted Latin American socialist Lefty Gomez - "I'd rather be lucky than good".

NO MORE FUZZY MATH: There is a mini Reader Revolt in the comments section at the Times. One example:

There is an obvious mistake in the coin toss example. The reason that the authors came up with a 40.5% probability that a heads follows a head is because they took a simple average rather than a weighted average. Each sequence has a different number of opportunities and this is information that needs to be included in the calculation. For example, HHHH has 3 opportunities for heads to follow heads (HH=3 + HT=0) while HHTH has only 2 (HH=1 + HT=1). If you weight each sequence by the number of opportunities, you will get the 50% probability that you expect by intuition.

Or put it this way: The table shows 16 possibilities for 4 coin flips, totaling 64 flips, half heads and half tails. The final flip in each group has no successor, so set that aside. Of the remaining 48 flips, 24 are heads and 24 tails. And, as noted in the table, 12 times a head was followed by a head, and 12 times it was followed by a tail. 50/50, as expected.

The paper is here. Eventually I hope to see whether it was the professors or the reporters who got this wrong, but I know how I'm betting.

Jack takes a coin from his pocket and decides that he will flip it 4 times in a row, writing down the outcome of each flip on a scrap of paper. After he is done flipping, he will look at the flips that immediately followed an outcome of heads, and compute the relative frequency of heads on those flips. Because the coin is fair, Jack of course expects this empirical probability of heads to be equal to the true probability of flipping a heads: 0.5. Shockingly, Jack is wrong. If he were to sample one million fair coins and flip each coin 4 times, observing the conditional relative frequency for each coin, on average the relative frequency would be approximately 0.4

Huh. That was pretty much the Times take-away too. And as noted above, for the 48 tosses (in 16 trials of four flips) that had a successor, there were 24 heads, half of which were followed by heads. However, by adopting an equal-weighting scheme for each of the sixteen possible 4-flip outcomes the results become tilted. Why? Because HHHH scores as 100% confirmation of the notion that H follows H, just as TTHH does. However, HHHH walked a tightrope, since any H among the first three could have been followed by a T. TTHH only had one opportunity to do or die. So Jack could very plausibly have decided to use a weighted average, which would have brought him back to concluding that HH and HT are 50/50.

However, this discussion by Steve Landsburg (which preceded the Times article) leaves me believing that the new paper is refuting the actual weighting scheme used by the basketball people [Gilovich et al]. But leave Jack out of it! And the WSJ has lots more on the availability of new data in all sports and its use in apparently confirming a 'hot hand' effect.

This footnote leaves me wondering whether we are all on the same page:

Similarly, it is easy to construct betting games that act as money pumps. For example, we can oer the following lottery at a $5 ticket price: a fair coin will be flipped 4 times. If the relative frequency of heads on those flips that immediately follow a heads is greater than 0.5 then the ticket pays $10; if the relative frequency is less than 0.5 then the ticket pays $0; if the relative frequency is exactly equal to 0.5, or if no flip is immediately preceded by a heads, then a new sequence of 4 flips is generated. While, intuitively, it seems like the expected payout of this ticket is $0, it is actually $-0.71 (see Table 1).

Table 1 is similar to the table in the Times, but let me note that I, at least, have no obvious "intuition" about whether this bet is fair. Since the payout is either $0 or $10 regardless of the probability of a specific outcome, it means the game is not fair if the underlying distribution is skewed. "Intuitively" I would worry that if one side of the expected value represents longshots, i.e., low probability of a seemingly valuable result, then the capped payouts might be an issue. E.g., a string of four straight heads has more effect on the overall expected value calculation than it does on the payout for a hypothetical ticket. Put another way, HHHH and HHHT pay off the same even though my intuition is that HHHH "ought" to be worth more, since a 100% success rate "ought" to be worth more than a 67% success rate. Looking at the table, as they describe this game, there are only 4 ways out of 16 to win but 6 ways to lose (with 6 tickets leading to a do-over).

JUST WHAT WAS BEING REFUTED?

This is from the 1985 Gilovich et al paper (p. 7/20 .pdf), and is as close to grouping the data in blocks of four as I can find:

To obtain a more sensitive test of stationarity, or a constant hit rate, we partitioned the entire record of each player into nonoverlapping sets of four consecutive shots. We then counted the number of sets in which the player’s performance was high (three or four hits), moderate (two hits), or low (zero or one hit). If a player is occasionally hot, then his record must include more high-performance sets than expected by chance.

The number of high, moderate, and low sets for each of the nine players were compared to the values expected by chance, assuming independent shots with a constant hit rate (derived from column 5 of Table 1). For example, the expected proportions of high-, moderate-, and low-performance sets for a player with a hit rate of 0.5 are 5/6, 6/16, and 5/16, respectively. The results provided no evidence for nonstationarity, or streak shooting, as none of the nine x2 values approached statistical significance.

This analysis was repeated four times, starting the partition into consecutive quadruples at the first, second, third, and fourth shot of each player’s shooting record. All of these analyses failed to support the nonstationarity hypothesis.

As I understand this (and using the Heads/Tails notation), HHHT, HHTH, HTHH and THHH would all score equally as a high success rate. Yet in the refuting paper, those four results produce quite different scores, and are the basis for the refutation. Que pasa?

October 16, 2015

France's top weatherman sparks storm over book questioning climate change

Philippe Verdier, weather chief at France Télévisions, the country's state broadcaster, reportedly sent on "forcedholiday" for releasing book accusing top climatologists of "taking the world hostage"

All very awkward, especially since Paris will be hosting the next big climate conference. More from Debra Heine at PJMedia, including this:

In his recent 60 Minutes interview, President Barack Obama claimed to be leading the world in getting an international accord in Paris — but according to recent reports, negotiators have all but given up on getting an enforceable deal.

October 15, 2015

Here is an interesting attempt to explain Putin's strategy in Syria and the Middle East.

Vladimir Putin is reshaping the Middle East to fit Russia’s interests by adhering to fundamentals of international affairs that the several parts of America’s foreign policy establishment have set aside in favor of what they deem sophistication.

Unlike our “Realists,” who start out compromising our interests with those of local allies, Putin is bending theirs to Russia’s. Unlike our Liberal Internationalists who try to lead by giving power to local allies, Putin directs them in operations of his choice. Unlike our Neoconservatives who deploy force piecemeal endlessly, Putin uses it decisively.

The Wall Street Journal’s “Realists” in a Sept. 29 piece fretted that Putin’s tank/plane/artillery expeditionary force is empowering Iran as well as Syria’s Assad: “Russian planes can target anyone Assad deems an enemy.” No. They are targeting anyone who stands in the way of Russia’s objectives. That’s a big, big difference. Neither Assad, nor Iran, nor Iran’s Shia allies in what used to be Iraq have any reason to delude themselves that Putin’s assistance will take them any farther toward their own objectives than is absolutely necessary for Putin to achieve his own.

And what are those goals?

Putin’s objectives are obvious: to secure Russia’s naval base at Tartus, surrounded by a substantial enclave of Alewives rendered reliably reliant on Moscow and who will serve as its pied a terre on the Mediterranean shore, crush all challenges thereto; since ISIS is the apex of the Sunni militancy that is also infecting Russia through the Caucasus, crush ISIS. Unlike our geniuses, Putin knows that the Assad regime, the Shia militias, and the Iranians are the only people who will hazard their lives to save the Alewis and to crush ISIS. So, he is arming and organizing them. But he has no intention of trying to re-unite Syria under Assad, or to try to re-unite Iraq under the Shia, much less of seconding Iran in its Islamic World War against the Sunni.

As an aside - Obama patiently explained to us morons that, since the US probably couldn't achieve its objectives by force in the Mid East, Putin could not either. That does not follow, since Putin's objectives, as described above, can be quite different from US goals, whatever they may be. My impression is that an overriding priority for Obama is to vindicate his opposition to the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Beyond that, I guess he is aiming for a negotiated transition to a unified Syria that excludes Assad, and an international coalition battling ISIS.

I think Obama is right that the US can't unify Syria by force, but that hardly means Putin can't create an Allawite enclave by force. One might think of the Kurdish enclave we created in Iraq back in 1992 with the no-fly zone there.

As to the idea that the US can lead from behind a Coalition of the Unwilling to battle ISIS while Sunni Arabs fret about a newly empowered and aggressive Iran - please. But that hardly implies that Putin can't team up with Iran and Assad to take a few bites out of ISIS when it suits him.

The United States is an order-building power, working at the construction of an international system in which all nations can prosper and live in peace even as it seeks to protect its own security and advance its own economic interests.... Russia today seeks to disrupt, undermine and ultimately dismantle America’s order building will and capacity; President Obama wants to uphold and extend it.

This much, President Obama has right. But what President Obama doesn’t acknowledge, or at least didn’t on 60 Minutes, is that while he is a constructive statesman and Putin is a destroyer, Putin is having much more success ripping bits of the order down than Obama is having holding it together. President Obama may be the high school principal and Putin nothing more than a juvenile delinquent, but the school walls are covered with graffiti, the principal is being mocked as a loser by both teachers and students, his car has been egged, and he’s got a “Kick Me” sign taped to his back.

The weekend’s news from the Middle East brought yet more evidence that Principal Obama has lost control of the school.

October 14, 2015

WASHINGTON — With pressure building on the White House to slow or completely halt the withdrawal of American troops from Afghanistan, senior officials said that President Obama appears increasingly willing to keep a force there large enough to carry on the hunt for Al Qaeda and Islamic State militants.

For President Obama, leaving more than a small force to protect the embassy in Kabul beyond next year would mean abandoning his goal to bring home almost all American troops before leaving office. But even though Mr. Obama has declared the American war in Afghanistan to be over, the Taliban’s recent advances have convinced the Pentagon, many in Congress and much of the national security establishment in Washington that it is critical for American troops to remain there.

Gosh, one does hate to see reality intrude upon Obama's memoirs. But there is still time for him to pin down a legacy of retreat and defeat!

The establishment speaks:

Beyond the military, though, a powerful cross-section of the American foreign policy and national security establishment is also pushing for as broad a military commitment in Afghanistan as possible. The latest salvo is a paper to be released on Wednesday by the Atlantic Council, a think tank, which bluntly declares: “U.S. and NATO force levels and presence around the country, as well as intelligence assets, should be maintained at or close to present levels.”

The main argument of the paper, which was written by James B. Cunningham, a former ambassador to Afghanistan, centers on the need to continue helping Afghan forces, and to give the next American administration as much flexibility as possible.

But the most striking element of the paper, which was provided to The New York Times ahead of its release, is the list of more than 20 former senior officials, Democrats and Republicans alike, who have signed on to it. The list includes Madeleine Albright, the former secretary of state who served under President Clinton; Stephen Hadley, who was national security adviser to President George W. Bush; two former defense secretaries, Chuck Hagel and Leon Panetta (who also ran the Central Intelligence Agency); and four former American ambassadors to Afghanistan. The paper’s two sponsors are Senators John McCain, Republican of Arizona, and Jack Reed, Democrat of Rhode Island.

Pushback from the left:

Yet, as American critics of a continued military presence in Afghanistan readily point out, Mr. Ghani is not popular among Afghans. And the problems in his government — like corruption and incompetence — run so deep that fixing them will take years, possibly decades.

For some in Washington, that is simply too long of a commitment for the United States to make, especially when the results are far from certain.

“We need to have a conversation about how much we care about this place,” said Douglas Ollivant, a senior fellow at The New America Foundation in Washington.

“Are we willing to spend — the numbers are fuzzy — but somewhere between $10 and $20 billion per year in perpetuity for the privilege of Afghanistan not totally collapsing,” said Mr. Ollivant, who previously who worked in the National Security Council for Mr. Obama and Mr. Bush. “And we’re not talking about it being Xanadu — we’re talking about not collapsing.”

Some cans really ought to be kicked down the road. Obama is already leaving his successor steaming piles in Libya, Syria and Iraq (which of course he abandoned too soon); why not let his successor decide what to do about Afghanistan?

WASHINGTON — The United States will halt its military withdrawal from Afghanistan and instead keep thousands of troops in the country through the end of President Obama’s term in 2017, Mr. Obama will announce on Thursday, prolonging the American role in a war that has now stretched on for 14 years.

The current American force in Afghanistan of 9,800 troops will remain in place through most of 2016 under the Obama administration’s revised plans, before dropping to about 5,500 at the end of next year or in early 2017, senior administration officials said.

Some of the troops will continue to train and advise Afghan forces, while others will carry on the search for Qaeda fighters and militants from the Islamic State and other groups who have found a haven in Afghanistan, they said.

Obama was comfortable expressing his skepticism of his own attempt to train some Syrian rebels; will he express similar "I told you so-ism" about his abandonment of his politically motivated troop withdrawal timetable?

October 13, 2015

The Democrats have decided that Hillary should have as many obstacles to her coronation cleared as possible. While there were 26 Democratic debates in the 2008 presidential election cycle, this time around there are only six planned. And the first one is tonight. What a time to be alive!

The Vice Chair of the DNC, Hawaii Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard found out that questioning such a decision comes with consequences. She was uninvited to the debate. Dissent has never been the highest form of patriotism in the Democratic party except for when it could be used as a cudgel against Republicans. Seven years into the Obama Era, that time is long past (3 minutes into the next Republican administration it will be reborn, of course).

I cannot tell you how excited I am that the Democrats are holding their first presidential debate. No, I mean I literally cannot tell you about my excitement. How do you describe something that does not exist?

Anyway, the debate starts at 8:30 Eastern, or 5:30 local time in Las Vegas where it's being held. It will be televised on CNN, but chances are Donald Trump live tweeting the debate will garner more attention. Trump will no doubt be more entertaining, and most likely more informative.

October 12, 2015

In an interview, Obama deploys the Strategic Aneurysm Device against his libertarian opponents:

“Whenever I hear people saying that our problems would be solved without government, I always want to tell them you need to go to some other countries where there really is no government, where the roads are never repaired ... or kids don’t have access to basic primary education,” he said. “That’s the logical conclusion if, in fact, you think that government is the enemy.”

So only government can run primary schools? Nuns everywhere are looking for Obama's knuckles to rap. Ooops, am I hinting that church run schools are common and effective? Back to Obama!

In the unusual discussion, Obama revealed some of his longstanding frustrations with politics while asking the Iowa author [Marilynne Robinson] questions about her family, her Christian faith and her writings.

“How do you reconcile the idea of faith being really important to you and you caring a lot about taking faith seriously with the fact that, at least in our democracy and our civic discourse, it seems as if folks who take religion the most seriously sometimes are also those who are suspicious of those not like them?” Obama asked during the interview, which was published Monday in the New York Review of Books.

Wow - would he ask that of a black minister? Did he ask that of Jeremiah "God Damn America" Wright? And did this come up in his chat with the Pope?

As to his point, if a Christian bitter-clinger expresses a preference to stay away from gay marriages he is denounced as a bigoted hater and might be hauled into court. If an otherwise ordinary citizen announces a preference to stay away from church... nobody cares. So which side is viewing the other with suspicion?

The Times hints at a reason to tune in to the Democrat debate on Tuesday night - the prospect of schizophrenic Obama bashing!

A Likely Debate Highlight: Democrats’ Distance From Obama

The major Democratic presidential candidates disagree with President Obama on trade. They think he has not done enough to push for gun control or to overhaul the immigration system. They believe they could do a better job moving legislation through a Republican-controlled Congress.

And on Tuesday night in Las Vegas at the first Democratic primary debate, a new reality will become clear: It’s not Barack Obama’s party anymore.

And a bit further on, we get to the bread and butter kitchen table issue:

A theme likely to dominate the debate, on CNN, is the problem of economic inequality and with it the implicit critique that although Mr. Obama pulled the economy out of the crisis that enveloped it in 2008, the recovery has left the vast majority of Americans behind. That sentiment has manifested itself on the campaign trail in a populist conviction reflected in the major candidates’ positions on topics including trade agreements and Wall Street regulation.

“They may not come out and criticize Obama, but they’ll all be saying, ‘This hasn’t been a good recovery for most people,’ ” said Dean Baker, an economist and a co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research.

Presumably the CNN moderators will attempt to lead a vigorous debate on the question of whether guns are even scarier than Donald Trump (the question of whether Bush and Cheney are Satan and the Anti-Christ, or vice versa is soooo yesterday). If they fail in that task we may see the first hour devoted to methods by which a Democratic President can wave more in unskilled, undocumented future friends from south of the border, followed by a second hour in which the candidates ruminate about the causes and cures of working class wage stagnation. Should be interesting!

The Times takes a while to mention the Hillary connection here, but stay with them:

Spying Case Against U.S. Envoy Is Falling Apart, and Following a Pattern

WASHINGTON — Last fall, federal agents raided the home and office of Robin L. Raphel in search of proof that she, a seasoned member of America’s diplomatic corps, was spying for Pakistan. But officials now say the spying investigation has all but fizzled, leaving the Justice Department to decide whether to prosecute Ms. Raphel for the far less serious charge of keeping classified information in her home.

What, it is illegal to mishandle classified information? Well, sometimes...

Ms. Raphel, in negotiations with the government, has rejected plea deals and has been adamant that she face no charges, according to current and former government officials, particularly because the Justice Department has been criticized in recent years for handing out inconsistent punishments to American officials who mishandle classified information.

After more background on this case the Times gets to some similar examples:

Over the years, the stories of American officials mishandling classified information have at times seemed as peculiar as they were serious. John P. O’Neill, a counterterrorism specialist for the F.B.I., once lost a briefcase full of government secrets in a Florida hotel. Samuel R. Berger, the national security adviser to President Bill Clinton, stole classified documents from the National Archives and hid them under a construction trailer. As attorney general, Alberto R. Gonzales took material about the nation’s warrantless wiretapping program home with him.

One C.I.A. director, John M. Deutch, stored classified information on his home computer. Another C.I.A. director, David H. Petraeus, shared his highly classified journals with his mistress, then lied to the F.B.I. about it. Hillary Rodham Clinton used a private email system when she was secretary of state that investigators say contained classified information, although Mrs. Clinton and the State Department say the information was not marked as classified.

The punishment for mishandling classified information has varied wildly. Mrs. Clinton has not been charged with wrongdoing. Mr. Berger pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor. Mr. Deutch received a pardon from Mr. Clinton and was never charged. Mr. Gonzales and Mr. O’Neill were not charged. In the most recent case, the Justice Department allowed Mr. Petraeus to plead guilty to a misdemeanor, despite strong objections from investigators. That deal was so contentious that the F.B.I. director, James B. Comey, personally appealed to the attorney general, Eric H. Holder Jr., and said that Mr. Petraeus’s crimes warranted felony charges, according to two government officials involved in the case. F.B.I. agents are still angry about that decision and say it set a standard that will make it harder to bring cases in the future.

Pretty suspenseful - are there enough pro-truth and pro-Biden people in the Obama Justice Department to seriously pursue Hillary?

October 11, 2015

I am sure the JOM representative in the Louisville Ironman will acquit herself admirably. This is a full 2.4 mile swim, 112 mile bike ride, and a 26.2 mile run. Some words of inspiration from the competitor, who has done these distances separately but never consecutively:

"I'm not afraid of the swim. I'm not afraid of the ride. And I am not afraid of the walk."

Two outside investigators looking into the death of Tamir Rice have concluded that a Cleveland police officer, Tim Loehmann, acted reasonably in deciding last year to shoot when he confronted the 12-year-old boy carrying what turned out to be a replica gun.

I don't buy it emotionally. However, we are talking about "reasonable" from a legal perspective, not a common-sense or training academy perspective:

“The question is not whether every officer would have reacted the same way,” Kimberly A. Crawford, the retired F.B.I. agent, wrote in her report, which noted that Officer Loehmann had no way of knowing Tamir’s gun was fake. “Rather, the relevant inquiry is whether a reasonable officer confronting the exact same scenario under identical conditions could have concluded that deadly force was necessary.”

The 'exact same scenario' includes, IMHO, the fact that the officers drove up to within ten feet of an alleged gun-waver in a park that seemed to be virtually empty. Being that close to a possible gunman left the officers in reasonable concern for their lives, but that was a "fact" they had created with their previous three seconds of driving.

MORE: Video here. The park certainly appears deserted, although I also note that at one point in the video either a ghost walks by or the techies have blotted someone out. The shooting occurs around the 7 min mark.

The Obama administration’s $500 million initiative to train and arm so-called moderate rebels to take on the Islamic State never seemed promising when it was rolled out last year. Having acknowledged that this plan has failed — largely because Syrian opposition groups are more interested in taking on President Bashar al-Assad — the White House on Friday unveiled a plan that is even more incoherent and fraught with risk.

The Pentagon will stop putting rebel fighters through training in neighboring countries, a program that was designed to ensure that fighters were properly vetted before they could get their hands on American weapons and ammunition. The new plan will simply funnel weapons through rebel leaders who are already in the fight and appear to be making some headway.

“Obviously, this is a different approach, where we’re going to be vetting leaders as opposed to each individual fighter,” said Christine Wormuth, the Pentagon’s chief of policy.

The initial plan was dubious. The new one is hallucinatory, and it is being rolled out as the war enters a more perilous phase now that Russia has significantly stepped up its military support of Mr. Assad’s forces.

There is no reason to believe that the United States will suddenly be successful in finding rebel groups that share its narrow goal of weakening the Islamic State, also known as ISIS or ISIL, but not joining the effort to topple Mr. Assad. Washington’s experience in Syria and other recent wars shows that proxy fighters are usually fickle and that weapons thrust into a war with no real oversight often end up having disastrous effects.

A few days back (Oct 4) the Times reported on Obama's bold new plan without addressing the obvious follow-up questions about where these new-found rebels came from. On Saturday, probably their lowest-impact day, they finally give us a bit more and are fulminating against it.

Since you ask, this was my reaction on Monday to the news that Obama had agreed to arm unvetted rebels:

As to how 3,000 to 5,000 acceptable Syrian Arabs suddenly arose from the desert when we have been hearing about our inability to find suitable moderate rebels willing to re-direct their rebellion against Assad and fight ISIS, well, don't ask, don't tell.

The overnight brawl between two groups of students escalated into violence when a freshman at Northern Arizona University opened fire on four fraternity members, killing one and wounding three.

Steven Jones, an 18-year-old fraternity pledge, told police he shot the group of students only after they hit him in the face and chased him, according to court documents. He also said he tried to administer first aid to one of the victims.

Prosecutors said the suspect's account amounted to a "self-serving" statement and alleged Jones was the aggressor.

"There is no indication of self-defense here," Deputy Coconino County Attorney Ammon Barker said. "The defendant had retreated from the fight, he obtained a gun and then he went back into the fray."

Witnesses get confused but there ought to be a lot of them. And just offhand, if Jones was running to his car while being chased by the eventual victims, either he is a heck of a runner or they were not very committed chasers, because he obviously achieved enough separation to open his car and get into (I presume) the glove compartment for his handgun. So either the pursuers closed the gap while he got his gun, or he got his gun after which the separation was closed either by their continued advance or his re-engagement.

Well. If I were investigating the self-defense story, I would determine how close his car was to the shooting.

"We had just left a party and were standing in the street getting ready to walk home when a guy walked up with a pistol and just started shooting," said an eyewitness, who asked that his name not be used.

"I heard five or six shots and then my friends just tackled him. They got him really quick. We were leaving and it all happened on the sidewalk across from Mountain View."

It is possible this witness left the party just after the initial confrontation and saw the shooter returning with his weapon. At a minimum, this version might be why the DA isn't buying the self-defense claim.

October 09, 2015

Breaking news from Northern Arizona University [and do let me add: Arizona is a 'stand your ground' state and from what little we know - the shooting took place during a confrontation between two groups of students - self-defense may be on the table. Yike - that alone assures a media firestorm. And what if the shooter was defending a media-sympathetic student from some troglodyte fraternity haters? Oh, brother.]:

Officials: 1 dead, 3 wounded in NAU shooting

One person is dead, three others were injured and a suspect is in custody after a shooting early Friday outside a Northern Arizona University residence hall in Flagstaff, according to a statement posted on the state school's website.

Police were first alerted to shots fired on the northeast end of campus at about 1:20 a.m., the statement said. The shootings reportedly took place outside Mountain View Hall, which houses members of fraternities and sororities.

Three people were being treated for gunshot wounds at Flagstaff Medical Center, according to the NAU statement.

A spokesman said Friday morning that the campus is secure and classes would be held as scheduled. A second spokesman said the incident started with a "confrontation."

The FBI standard for a mass shooting is four dead, excluding the perpetrator, so this incident won't enter that database. And until we have more details about the race and motives of the shooter, we won't know if this is ripe for politicization.

“We awake this morning to a terrible tragedy on our Flagstaff campus,” university president Rita Cheng said at a news conference.

“This is not going to be a normal day at NAU,” she added. “Our hearts are heavy.”

According to Fowler, the police chief, “two separate student groups got into a confrontation” shortly after 1 a.m. on Friday. “The confrontation turned physical,” Fowler said, and Jones “produced a handgun and shot four other students.”

Delta Chi’s international headquarters confirmed in a statement to The Washington Post that some of its fraternity members were “involved” in the shooting.

“We do not have any information on the victims nor do we know if the deceased individual is a member of the Fraternity,” the statement said. Delta Chi added that the shooting “was not a chapter related incident.”

School officials did not immediately identify the dead student, other than to say he was a freshman. The school has not yet named three wounded students, all of whom are male.

School administrators identified the victims as Nicholas Prato, Kyle Zientek and Nicholas Piring and said the deceased student is Colin Brough.

This witness account from the Arizon Dail Sun does not jibe with the police statement excerpted above:

According to reports from the scene, it followed a party and occurred in a parking lot outside Mountain View Hall dormitory.

"We had just left a party and were standing in the street getting ready to walk home when a guy walked up with a pistol and just started shooting," said an eyewitness, who asked that his name not be used.

"I heard five or six shots and then my friends just tackled him. They got him really quick. We were leaving and it all happened on the sidewalk across from Mountain View."

The shooter was tackled to the ground.

"He didn't get a chance to hurt himself. I saw him in handcuffs when the cops came."

That doesn't square with:

According to Fowler, the police chief, “two separate student groups got into a confrontation” shortly after 1 a.m. on Friday. “The confrontation turned physical,” Fowler said, and Jones “produced a handgun and shot four other students.”

Per the witness, it was one group versus one shooter, and the confrontation began with shots, not any sort of argument. I assume they spoke to more people and are more familiar with witness unreliability so I am more inclined to trust the police version on this one.

An NAU official has confirmed that the suspected shooter is in police custody. While the investigation is ongoing, one father says his daughter, a student at the school, met the suspected shooter only hours before the incident.

The father is Mark White, who we hear in a news report embedded at Coed.com, just after the text which reads:

It seems as though this wasn’t a premeditated attack, but rather a situation that escalated and got out of hand. Watch this video interview from a father who claims his daughter was studying with Steven in the library before the shooting...

The relevant portion begins at the 1:00 mark. The gist - the shooter met the young lady and a friend in the library around 12-12:30. They got texts about parties and went their separate ways. later, two groups met up, a fight broke out, and shots were fired.

U.S. dietary guidelines have long recommended that people steer clear of whole milk, and for decades, Americans have obeyed. Whole milk sales shrunk. It was banned from school lunch programs. Purchases of low-fat dairy climbed.

“Replace whole milk and full-fat milk products with fat-free or low-fat choices,” says the Dietary Guidelines for Americans, the federal government's influential advice book, citing the role of dairy fat in heart disease.

Whether this massive shift in eating habits has made anyone healthier is an open question among scientists, however. In fact, research published in recent years indicates that the opposite might be true: millions might have been better off had they stuck with whole milk.

ReadChew through the whole thing.

And if you think I'm done milking the puns for all they're worth, well, let's just say there's still meat on that bone.

October 05, 2015

Team Obama, apparently abashed by their humiliation by Putin last week, leaks word to the Times that they are still a 'playa' in Syria:

U.S. Aims to Put More Pressure on ISIS in Syria

WASHINGTON — The American-led coalition fighting the Islamic State has begun preparing to open a major front in northeastern Syria, aiming to put pressure on Raqqa, the terrorist group’s de facto capital, according to military and administration officials.

President Obama last week approved two important steps to set the offensive in motion over the coming weeks, officials said. Mr. Obama ordered the Pentagon, for the first time, to directly provide ammunition and perhaps some weapons to Syrian opposition forces on the ground. He also endorsed the idea for an increased air campaign from an air base in Turkey, although important details still need to be worked out.

Just last week! And only a few important details need to be worked out.

Together, these measures are intended to empower 3,000 to 5,000 Arab fighters who would join more than 20,000 Kurdish combatants in an offensive backed by dozens of coalition warplanes to pressure Raqqa, the Islamic State’s main stronghold in Syria. Plans are also moving forward to have Syrian opposition fighters seal an important 60-mile part of the country’s border with Turkey to cut off critical supply lines of the Islamic State, also known as ISIS or ISIL.

...

Senior administration officials say the new offensive holds promise and may change the dynamics on the ground. But it comes a year after an American-led coalition started a campaign against the Islamic State that is now “tactically stalemated,” Gen. Martin E. Dempsey, then chairman of the Joint Chiefs, said last month.

The Administration doesn't want to admit that they are leaking this in response to last week's embarrassments and the Times doesn't want to admit they are presenting Obama Administration press releases, so we get some window-dressing:

These outlines of the mission have been drawn from public statements of senior commanders briefing Congress as well as interviews with more than a half-dozen military, diplomatic and administration officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal planning. Even in describing the goals of the campaign, officials said they would not disclose the kinds of details that might help the Islamic State anticipate exactly how the offensive would unfold.

They don't want to help ISIS, just Obama.

The details are interesting, albeit puzzling:

The origins of the northern front lie in the fight for Kobani, the Syrian Kurdish border city that faced an Islamic State onslaught last year. Kobani showed the potential for using a combined air and ground operation to defeat the Islamic State. The United States and its allies provided the combat aircraft, and Syrian Kurdish fighters, in contact with American Special Operations Forces in northern Iraq, provided the ground force.

...

The operation now being prepared would expand the Kurdish effort by adding Arab groups. In addition to increasing the number of anti-Islamic State fighters, the inclusion of Arab fighters eases Turkish concerns that the Syrian Kurds are becoming too influential in northern Syria.

The Arab wing of this ground force is called the Syrian Arab Coalition, a conglomeration of 10 to 15 groups whose total numbers range from 3,000 to 5,000 fighters, American officials said. They would fight alongside a larger Kurdish force in the northeast of as many as 25,000 fighters.

American military officials have screened the leaders of the Arab groups to ensure that they meet standards set by Congress when it approved $500 million last year for the Defense Department to train and equip moderate Syrian rebels. Most of the focus of that financing has been on an ill-fated Pentagon training program at sites in Turkey and Jordan that so far has fielded few fighters.

The administration’s plan is to support the Kurdish and Arab fighters and have them advance toward Raqqa, but not try to seize the heavily defended city itself. Rather, the aim is to isolate Raqqa and cut it off from travel and supply lines northeast and northwest of the city.

If we can get the Turks to stop bombing the Kurds, that's progress. As to how 3,000 to 5,000 acceptable Syrian Arabs suddenly arose from the desert when we have been hearing about our inability to find suitable moderate rebels willing to re-direct their rebellion against Assad and fight ISIS, well, don't ask, don't tell.

QUESTIONS I CAN'T ANSWER: At his recent press conference Obama reiterated that Assad was the problem. Yet we will only arm rebels that drop their fight against Assad to take on ISIS. Yet more evidence that I am not a genius like Obama.

THE PRESIDENT: Well, first and foremost, let’s understand what’s happening in Syria and how we got here. What started off as peaceful protests against Assad, the president, evolved into a civil war because Assad met those protests with unimaginable brutality. And so this is not a conflict between the United States and any party in Syria; this is a conflict between the Syrian people and a brutal, ruthless dictator.

...

So in my discussions with President Putin, I was very clear that the only way to solve the problem in Syria is to have a political transition that is inclusive -- that keeps the state intact, that keeps the military intact, that maintains cohesion, but that is inclusive -- and the only way to accomplish that is for Mr. Assad to transition, because you cannot rehabilitate him in the eyes of Syrians.

October 04, 2015

But how much difference does it make? Here’s some perspective: To offset the greenhouse impact of one passenger’s round-trip flight between New York and London, you’d have to recycle roughly 40,000 plastic bottles, assuming you fly coach. If you sit in business- or first-class, where each passenger takes up more space, it could be more like 100,000.

Even those statistics might be misleading. New York and other cities instruct people to rinse the bottles before putting them in the recycling bin, but the E.P.A.’s life-cycle calculation doesn’t take that water into account. That single omission can make a big difference, according to Chris Goodall, the author of “How to Live a Low-Carbon Life.” Mr. Goodall calculates that if you wash plastic in water that was heated by coal-derived electricity, then the net effect of your recycling could be more carbon in the atmosphere.

Pushing against the tide:

As a business, recycling is on the wrong side of two long-term global economic trends. For centuries, the real cost of labor has been increasing while the real cost of raw materials has been declining. That’s why we can afford to buy so much more stuff than our ancestors could. As a labor-intensive activity, recycling is an increasingly expensive way to produce materials that are less and less valuable.

Losing their religion:

Then why do so many public officials keep vowing to do more of it? Special-interest politics is one reason — pressure from green groups — but it’s also because recycling intuitively appeals to many voters: It makes people feel virtuous, especially affluent people who feel guilty about their enormous environmental footprint. It is less an ethical activity than a religious ritual, like the ones performed by Catholics to obtain indulgences for their sins.

Religious rituals don’t need any practical justification for the believers who perform them voluntarily. But many recyclers want more than just the freedom to practice their religion. They want to make these rituals mandatory for everyone else, too, with stiff fines for sinners who don’t sort properly. Seattle has become so aggressive that the city is being sued by residents who maintain that the inspectors rooting through their trash are violating their constitutional right to privacy.

My own little recycling story from my time in the Greatest City in the World in the late 80's is this: Our building would dutifully put out its trash on our assigned night, with most of the residents earnestly segregating the bottles into separate plastic bags. Distrustful of our diligence, the homeless would then slash open all the bags and toss the garbage around looking for additional recyclable bottles worth a $.05 deposit.

In the morning the trash trucks would come by and scoop up everything; sometimes, due to budget issues, the trucks were not equipped with a separate recycling section so all the garbage would be tossed into the same place. And as a bonus, from time to time our building would be warned that if our sorting was not even more diligent we would be fined. Some of the less motivated residents would then note that the police could probably go a mile or so north and cite the buildings up there for failing to recycle the glass containers littering over the sidewalk. For even more excitement they could then cite them for selling crack cocaine. Or why take a chance? That might get scary, whereas writing up a bunch of garbage-sorting NYC professionals is only hazardous if you ask them for tax planning advice.

A new study finds that people today who eat and exercise the same amount as people 20 years ago are still fatter.

A study published recently in the journal Obesity Research & Clinical Practice found that it’s harder for adults today to maintain the same weight as those 20 to 30 years ago did, even at the same levels of food intake and exercise.

The authors examined the dietary data of 36,400 Americans between 1971 and 2008 and the physical activity data of 14,419 people between 1988 and 2006. They grouped the data sets together by the amount of food and activity, age, and BMI.

They found a very surprising correlation: A given person, in 2006, eating the same amount of calories, taking in the same quantities of macronutrients like protein and fat, and exercising the same amount as a person of the same age did in 1988 would have a BMI that was about 2.3 points higher. In other words, people today are about 10 percent heavier than people were in the 1980s, even if they follow the exact same diet and exercise plans.

Ok, that's surprising. As a casual follower of this type of research I am aware that a lot of these physical activity and daily diet datasets are based on not wholly reliable surveys. But the authors of this study are surely aware of that, so let's press on to the speculation:

“Our study results suggest that if you are 25, you’d have to eat even less and exercise more than those older, to prevent gaining weight,” Jennifer Kuk, a professor of kinesiology and health science at Toronto’s York University, said in a statement. “However, it also indicates there may be other specific changes contributing to the rise in obesity beyond just diet and exercise.”

Just what those other changes might be, though, are still a matter of hypothesis. In an interview, Kuk proffered three different factors that might be making harder for adults today to stay thin.

First, people are exposed to more chemicals that might be weight-gain inducing. Pesticides, flame retardants, and the substances in food packaging might all be altering our hormonal processes and tweaking the way our bodies put on and maintain weight.

Second, the use of prescription drugs has risen dramatically since the ‘70s and ‘80s. Prozac, the first blockbuster SSRI, came out in 1988. Antidepressants are now one of the most commonly prescribed drugs in the U.S., and many of them have been linked to weight gain.

Finally, Kuk and the other study authors think that the microbiomes of Americans might have somehow changed between the 1980s and now. It’s well known that some types of gut bacteria make a person more prone to weight gain and obesity. Americans are eating more meat than they were a few decades ago, and many animal products are treated with hormones and antibiotics in order to promote growth. All that meat might be changing gut bacteria in ways that are subtle, at first, but add up over time. Kuk believes the proliferation of artificial sweeteners could also be playing a role.

Well fine, but let's take a suggestion from Captain Obvious - cigarette smoking is way down, which is surely a good thing, but it is also likely to have contributed to weight gain.

So we have half as many smokers as formerly. And from ABC News, July 11 2012:

Weight Gain After Quitting Smoking: Average Over 10 Pounds

As more people quit smokingcigarettes to protect their health, many face a new battle: weight gain. A new study in the journal BMJ shows that quitters gain more weight than anyone previously thought.

The research found that those who quit smoking gained an average of 10 to 11 pounds after 12 months, with most of the weight gain in the first three months.

Still, that shouldn't stop people from kicking the habit for good, the researchers said.

Scientists from France and the U.K. conducted a meta-analysis that examined 62 European-based studies of weight gain among people who had successfully stopped smoking. They said the average weight gain was higher than doctors generally thought, though there were substantial differences among study participants.

According to a report released yesterday by the National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS), the rate of antidepressant use in this country among teens and adults (people ages 12 and older) increased by almost 400% between 1988–1994 and 2005–2008.

The federal government’s health statisticians figure that about one in every 10 Americans takes an antidepressant. And by their reckoning, antidepressants were the third most common prescription medication taken by Americans in 2005–2008, the latest period during which the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES) collected data on prescription drug use.

So from 2.5% to 10%. of the population from a late 80s starting point. And the weight gain, per the article linked by The Atlantic? Uhh, ambiguous on net, although dramatic for some:

Antidepressants are the most-prescribed drugs in the U.S. for people between the ages of 18 and 44, and more than 10 percent of Americans are on them at any given time. And yet, some people who desperately need to be taking them are afraid to start because certain types of antidepressants have been associated with weight gain.

And some don't.

Two recent studies add more (contradictory, sorry) threads to the depression-weight tangle.

First, a JAMA Psychiatry analysis of more than 19,000 patient medical records found that people taking antidepressants did, in fact, put on a few pounds, but only a small amount. At most, it was only about two and a half pounds, in the case of the SSRI citalopram (which is marketed as Celexa). And people taking bupropion (Wellbutrin), which is not an SSRI, actually lost a half a pound.

Well that doesn't panic me.

However, another study published in the journal PLOS One found that antidepressants come with a strong association with obesity. Among women with a history of depression, those who took antidepressants were 14 percent more likely to be overweight and 71 percent more likely to be obese than women who weren’t on antidepressants.

So anti-depressant use is associated with obesity? Are we going to attempt to relate cause and effect here? No:

One reason this riddle is so hard to solve is that the depression makes some people lose weight, and others gain it. Thus, taking an antidepressant that just doesn’t happen to work very well might lead to weight gain—not because of the drug, but because the depression hasn’t gone away. Importantly, the PLOS Study didn’t measure whether the patients were obese to begin with, and the JAMA study didn’t prove that the antidepressants were responsible for the weight gain.

Well. When in doubt, do some fuzzy math. Per the lead, the population is ten percent heavier today for the same exercise and diet. Let's call that fifteen pounds on a one hundred fifty pounder from 1980.

On the cigarette side, if 20% of the population gained ten pounds, that would average two pounds per person across the full population. That leaves most of the fifteen pound weight gain unexplained.

But on the antidepressant side, if 10% of the population gains, hypothetically, 20 pounds, the average gain per person is still only equal to the cigarette result and the antidepressant studies cited ought to have come up with more decisive results.

So for my money, the cigarette weight gain, whatever it actually may be, probably is more important than the antidepressant effect, even though neither seems to explain much of the fifteen pound apparent puzzle.

One more thought - ritalin and the other ADHD medicines handed out like popcorn to adolescent boys often jam up a growing boys appetite and weight regulation. I have certainly seen young men with a post-ritalin weight management problem. And apparently my anecdotal experience has real science behind it:

Childhood ADHD Linked to Obesity in Adulthood

Increased risk of adult obesity is one of the long-term consequences facing children with ADHD, even if their diagnostic symptoms fade

Stimulants like Adderall or Ritalin could be a risk factor for childhood and adult obesity rather than childhood ADHD.

Now, the timing may not work - if we had a surge in ritalin use during the 90's, a medicated ten year old from 1995 would only have been 23 in 2008, the cut-off for the weight survey study data. And can gender differences in ritalin prescriptions be related to gender differences in the weight gain study? One more place to look.

The NY Times reports on gun violence, so you know we will be seeing some ludicrous statistics. Here we go, with the easy one first, my emphasis:

Those who study these types of mass murderers have found that they are almost always male (all but two of the 160 cases isolated by Dr. Duwe). Most are single, separated or divorced. The majority are white. With the exception of student shooters at high schools or lower schools, they are usually older than the typical murderer, often in their 30s or 40s.

Please, the majority of the country is white, and was more white in the 70's and 80's, so learning that the majority of shooters were white hardly tells us whether any particular ethnic group is under- or over-represented. Oddly, this notion that whites dominate the ranks of mass shooters was also trumpeted by - I kid you not - a French professor who was given guest space in the Times to vent her frustrations.

The Times then elides key information about whether there has been a trend in mass public shootings.

The mass public killings that have drawn such intense public attention are a phenomenon that largely did not occur until two generations ago.

...

Using data compiled by Dr. Duwe, the Congressional Research Service released a report this year that charted an increase in these shootings since then, from an average of one per year during the 1970s to four in the 2000s and a slight uptick in the last few years. The figures, however, are subject to intense debate, mainly over how to properly define the shootings.

With data provided by criminologist Grant Duwe, CRS also compiled a 44-year (1970-2013)dataset of firearms-related mass murders that could arguably be characterized as “mass public shootings.” These data show that there were on average:

one (1.1) incident per year during the 1970s (5.5 victims murdered, 2.0 wounded per incident),

nearly three (2.7) incidents per year during the 1980s (6.1 victims murdered, 5.3 wounded per incident),

four (4.0) incidents per year during the 1990s (5.6 victims murdered, 5.5 wounded per incident),

four (4.1) incidents per year during the 2000s (6.4 victims murdered, 4.0 wounded per incident),

and four (4.5) incidents per year from 2010 through 2013 (7.4 victims murdered, 6.3 wounded per incident).

These decade-long averages suggest that the prevalence, if not the deadliness, of “mass public shootings” increased in the 1970s and 1980s, and continued to increase, but not as steeply, during the 1990s, 2000s, and first four years of the 2010s.

So most of the increase from the 70's occurred in the 80's, leading the much-quoted James Alan Fox of Northeastern to conclude that this is "a tragedy, not a trend".

But do let me add my own concerns - first, the overall crime rate has come down since the 90's, but these public mass shooting has not. I can think of reasons, such as, vigorous policing and the the burn out of the crack wars discouraged criminals but not crazies. Still, one wonders.

A second concern with the data is that we have generally seen improvements in medical technology and emergency response times. An incident that in the 80's might have ended with four dead and two wounded might end today with three dead and three wounded. That is a win for the good guys, but creates haze around the statistics, since the current FBI reporting threshold requires four dead victims. The New Republic tackles the statistical quagmire of mass killings, mass shootings, spree killings, serial killings, and mass public shootings. Have a nice Sunday!

BIT DO LET ME NOTE SOME PROGRESS: I believe Nick Kristof still has good credentials on the left side of the street. So when he actually admits that some of the progressive vision about gun control is flawed, it may represent a bit of a breakthrough:

We’ve mourned too often, seen too many schools and colleges devastated by shootings, watched too many students get an education in grief. It’s time for a new approach to gun violence.

We’re angry, but we also need to be smart. And frankly, liberal efforts, such as the assault weapons ban, were poorly designed and saved few lives, while brazen talk about banning guns just sparked a backlash that empowered the National Rifle Association.

My, my. I have to admit, as soon as someone starts talking up an assault weapons ban I take that as evidence that they know nothing about that issue (and I speak with the conviction of a convert on that).

But Mr. Kristof is in a different category. Back in 2004 he mourned the death of the assault weapons ban but aired the alternative argument and did focus on magazine capacity:

Critics of the assault weapon ban have one valid point: the ban has more holes than Swiss cheese.

''The big frustration of my customers is that [the ban] removed things that were kind of fun and made it look cool, but didn't affect how the gun operated,'' said Sean Wontor, a salesman who heaved two rifles onto the counter of Sportsman's Warehouse here in Meridian to make his point.

One was an assault weapon that was produced before the ban (and thus still legal), and the other was a sanitized version produced afterward to comply with the ban by removing the bayonet mount and the flash suppressor.

After these cosmetic changes, the rifle is now no longer considered an assault weapon, yet, of course, it is just as lethal.

Americans are infatuated with guns. And when you’re infatuated, you sometimes can’t think straight. Maybe that’s why, three weeks after the Tucson shootings that shook the nation, we’re still no closer to banning oversize magazines like the 33-bullet model allegedly used there.

Today, he has moved on to science and high tech:

What we need is an evidence-based public health approach — the same model we use to reduce deaths from other potentially dangerous things around us, from swimming pools to cigarettes. We’re not going to eliminate guns in America, so we need to figure out how to coexist with them.

He makes a point I accept, with a caveat:

More than 60 percent of gun deaths are suicides, and most of the rest are homicides. Gun enthusiasts scoff at including suicides, saying that without guns people would kill themselves by other means. In many cases, though, that’s not true.

OK, but let's not conflate suicides and magazine capacity or assault weapons. We have not seen a rash of suicides where the victim shoots himself twenty times and bleeds out.

Public health experts cite many ways we could live more safely with guns, and many of them have broad popular support.

A poll this year found that majorities even of gun-owners favor universal background checks; tighter regulation of gun dealers; safe storage requirements in homes; and a 10-year prohibition on possessing guns for anyone convicted of domestic violence, assault or similar offenses.

We should also be investing in “smart gun” technology, such as weapons that fire only with a PIN or fingerprint. We should adopt microstamping that allows a bullet casing to be traced back to a particular gun. We can require liability insurance for guns, as we do for cars.

It’s not clear that these steps would have prevented the Oregon shooting. But Professor Webster argues that smarter gun policies could reduce murder rates by up to 50 percent — and that’s thousands of lives a year. Right now, the passivity of politicians is simply enabling shooters.

I would score that as definitely maybe. And the liability insurance is just a transparent ploy to make guns unaffordable, thereby assuring that only criminals will have them. Yes, we require cars to be registered and insured and the driver to have a license, but those laws are often ignored even thought a car is quite visible on a public street. Just how would an insurance requirement be enforced on the mean streets of New York, where the police are essentially not allowed to stop and chat with young black men? And who wants to see inner-city thugs actually arrested and jailed? Not progressives!

Still, we have a prominent progressive casting about for new ideas rather than recycling nonsense. That is progress.

October 03, 2015

KABUL – U.S. forces may have mistakenly bombed a hospital in northern Afghanistan on Saturday, killing at least 19 people, including three children, in an incident that will likely raise new questions about the scope of American involvement in the country’s 14-year war.

In a statement, Doctors Without Borders said an airstrike “partially destroyed” its trauma hospital in Kunduz, where the Afghan military has been trying to drive Taliban fighters from the city.

The airstrike killed at least 12 Doctors Without Borders staff members, the group said. Three children were also reportedly killed. At least 37 other people were seriously injured, including 19 staff members and 18 patients and caretakers. Officials warned the death toll could rise as dozens of people remain unaccounted for.

...

Military officials in Afghanistan confirmed that there was an airstrike, saying it was targeted at insurgents firing on U.S. servicemembers assisting Afghan Security Forces.

“I am aware of an incident that occurred at a Doctors without Borders hospital in Kunduz city today,” said Gen. John F. Campbell, commander of U.S. forces in Afghanistan. “I have spoken with [Afghanistan] President Ghani regarding today’s events. While we work to thoroughly examine the incident and determine what happened, my thoughts and prayers are with those affected.”

...

A U.S. military official, speaking on condition of anonymity to speak freely, said U.S. special forces soldiers were on the ground advising Afghan special forces. The official said that the U.S. troops detected incoming fire from the Taliban, so an AC-130 gunship was authorized to return fire, at an area that was apparently close to the hospital.

...

Officials with the relief group repeatedly informed the U.S.-led coalition of the hospital’s precise GPS coordinates over the past few months, hospital officials said. The location of the hospital was last conveyed to the international coalition three days ago, officials added.

Once the airstrike began Saturday, hospital officials immediately reached out to U.S. military officials in Kabul and Washington, according to Jason Cone, executive director of Doctors Without Borders in the United States.

“The bombing continued for more than 30 minutes after American and Afghan military officials in Kabul and Washington were first informed,” the organization said in a statement.

Even trying to view this charitably, it appears that the Taliban was smart/ruthless enough to take up positions near a hospital and we were dumb enough to take the bait.

Harold A. Schaitberger, the union’s general president, informed Mrs. Clinton’s campaign manager, Robby Mook, in a telephone call on Monday. According to a union official, Mr. Schaitberger told Mr. Mook that the executive board and rank-and-file members — the latter were recently polled — did not support a Clinton endorsement.

Left unmentioned, since the Times will be endorsing Hillary unless Biden goes transgender, is any mention of Hillary's post-9/11 efforts to position herself as a champion of first responders, which obviously includes firemen.

And how is that working out?

Mr. Schaitberger worried that a Clinton endorsement could deeply divide the firefighters, according to a union official who did not want to be identified because he was not authorized to speak about the endorsement decision. Members tilt Republican, but the union typically endorses Democrats for president because of their stances on labor and other issues of importance to firefighters. Union officials have cited Mr. Biden’s decades-long record of leadership on these issues.

No kidding.

MONEY WELL SPENT, or, I FEEL A SONG COMING ON: Drudge flags a story noting that Hillary spent $9,000 for a consultant to select some rock songs for the campaign trail. As someone nearly said, authenticity is the key to politics - once you can fake that, you've got it made.

So what song? "Don't Stop Thinking About Tomorrow" is out, and she has no easy choice such as "You Can Call Me Al". Hmm, that makes me think of "Call Me" - good energy, but maybe not for her. And "Call Me Maybe" cuts too close to home if donors are drifting away.

But the 1973 song, which includes the unforgettable lines “Your sister’s gone out/ She’s on a date/ You just sit at home and masturbate,” was played Sunday — apparently by mistake — in the Westchester, N.Y., college gym where Clinton announced her candidacy for the United States Senate.

“The message that got out by mistake was, ’Let’s say yes to drugs,’ ” Clinton’s unannounced opponent in the race, New York City Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, said the next day in his daily press conference.

I leave it to the wisdom of the many JOM commenters to save Hillary some money and come up with a playlist for her. I'm hearing Bob singing "I Threw It All Away" but I know we - and she! - can do better.

Ok, since I seem to be Stuck On Bob, what about Idiot Wind?

Someone's got it in for meThey're planting stories in the pressWhoever it is I wish they'd cut it out quickBut when they will I can only guess

AN OLDIE BUT MAYBE NOT-SO-GOODY: There is roughly no chance Joe Biden goes with that other golden oldie "Hey Joe".

October 02, 2015

On Syria, Obama mentioned Assad's despicable use of barrel bombs on his civilian population several times. But is a no-fly zone a good idea? NOT SO FAST, haters - it's complicated, and has been for years. And Obama won't do half-measures. Far better to do no measures. And Hillary's call for a no-fly zone is just political grandstanding, unlike the calls from the Republican haters, who are just "half-baked" and full of "mumbo jumbo". An awkward moment, and how come no one keeps Obama current on Hillary's shifting winds? [More from the WaPo.]

In a moment even more detached from reality Obama addressed the question of why there seems to be a growing perception that Putin is winning and Obama is losing.

His gist - the US economy is growing, we are the world's economic bright spot, and the Russian economy is shrinking. Putin is shoving his troops into the Syrian quagmire, which will be a long term mistake, and anyway, his only allies in the region are Libya and Syria (but not Iran?!? With whom he is coordinating air strikes, while monitoring their compliance with the nuclear deal? [my bad, Obama linked them elsewhere]), and how is that working for him, so c'mon, haters, this is what winning looks like!

In any case, his gist is that all Republicans oppose gun control, so let's not talk about the Democrats who also oppose it; let's talk about the kooky Republicans reasons for opposing common sense gun safety laws. Those reason range from unconvincing to silly, but let me spend the most time on the absurd idea that I want to confiscate everyone's guns and permanently empower myself. C'mon, haters, serious up!

Well, he omitted "half-baked" "mumbo jumbo", so there is that. Such a small, unimaginative, divisive President committed to leading half the people. Is this really his idea of a way to promote national dialogue? I am sure that in his mind he scored this as 'Obama 1, Strawmen 0", but acknowledging the actual concerns of serious opponents is often a better negotiating ploy. Obama is not even pretending to lead here; he is just delivering fundraising soundbites for the DNC.

Obama also noted that on the mean streets of Chicago the level of violence we saw in the Oregon shooting is an everyday (or at least, every weekend) occurrence, so of course stricter laws would help there as well. How that coexists with "Black Lives Matter" and the end of stop and frisk in New York City was left unexplained. [But The American Interest notes the tension, i.e., contradiction:

Moreover, all the evidence suggests that stricter gun laws would fall disproportionately on the same people who have always bear the brunt of tough criminal justice policies. The Washington Post‘s Radley Balko noted last year that “47.3 percent of those convicted for federal gun crimes were black — a racial disparity larger than any other class of federal crimes, including drug crimes.” According to the Bureau of Labor of Justice statistics, state, local, and federal governments arrested black people for gun crimes at a five times higher rate than they arrested whites. More than three out of four gun arrests were in urban areas. So people who empathize with the message of the Black Lives Matter movement—that young, black men in America’s cities are treated unfairly by the criminal justice system and that mass incarceration has devastated too many communities—should think further about what the draconian gun policies they pine for would actually entail.

Most socially liberal gun control champions don’t see themselves as pushing policies that would abet racial profiling or worsen the problem of mass incarceration. They see themselves as going after their political enemies—socially conservative white men in red states. And it may in fact be possible to craft narrow gun policies—like requiring more background checks at gun shows—that would mostly affect people in this demographic. But few intelligent observers are under any illusions that this type of symbolic half-measure on gun control would meaningfully cut into America’s gun violence statistics.

This is a hugely, difficult, complex problem. And I would have hoped that we would have learned that from Afghanistan and Iraq, where we have devoted enormous time and effort and resources with the very best people and have given the Afghan people and the Iraqi people an opportunity for democracy. But it’s still hard, as we saw this week in Afghanistan. That's not by virtue of a lack of effort on our part, or a lack of commitment. We’ve still got 10,000 folks in Afghanistan. We're still spending billions of dollar supporting that government, and it’s still tough.

So when I make a decision about the level of military involvement that we're prepared to engage in, in Syria, I have to make a judgment based on, once we start something we’ve got to finish it, and we’ve got to do it well. And do we, in fact, have the resources and the capacity to make a serious impact -- understanding that we’ve still got to go after ISIL in Iraq; we still have to support the training of an Iraqi military that is weaker than any of us perceived; that we still have business to do in Afghanistan. And so I push -- and have consistently over the last four, five years sought out a wide range of opinions about steps that we can take potentially to move Syria in a better direction.

I am under no illusions about what an incredible humanitarian catastrophe this is, and the hardships that we're seeing, and the refugees that are traveling in very dangerous circumstances and now creating real political problems among our allies in Europe, and the heartbreaking images of children drowned trying to escape war, and the potential impact of such a destabilized country on our allies in the region. But what we have learned over the last 10, 12, 13 years is that unless we can get the parties on the ground to agree to live together in some fashion, then no amount of U.S. military engagement will solve the problem. And we will find ourselves either doing just a little bit and not making a difference, and losing credibility that way, or finding ourselves drawn in deeper and deeper into a situation that we can't sustain.

And when I hear people offering up half-baked ideas as if they are solutions, or trying to downplay the challenges involved in this situation -- what I’d like to see people ask is, specifically, precisely, what exactly would you do, and how would you fund it, and how would you sustain it? And typically, what you get is a bunch of mumbo jumbo.

So these are hard challenges. They are ones that we are going to continue to pursue. The topline message that I want everybody to understand is we are going to continue to go after ISIL. We are going to continue to reach out to a moderate opposition. We reject Russia’s theory that everybody opposed to Assad is a terrorist. We think that is self-defeating. It will get them into a quagmire. It will be used as a further recruitment tool for foreign fighters.

And on gun control safety:

The reason that Congress does not support even the modest gun safety laws that we proposed after Sandy Hook is not because the majority of the American people don’t support it. I mean, normally, politicians are responsive to the views of the electorate [unless the topic is ObamaCare or the Iran non-treaty - TM]. Here you’ve got the majority of the American people think it’s the right thing to do. Background checks, other common-sense steps that would maybe save some lives couldn’t even get a full vote. And why is that? It’s because of politics. It’s because interest groups fund campaigns, feed people fear. And in fairness, it’s not just in the Republican Party -- although the Republican Party is just uniformly opposed to all gun safety laws. And unless we change that political dynamic, we’re not going to be able to make a big dent in this problem.

For example, you’ll hear people talk about the problem is not guns, it’s mental illness. Well, if you talk to people who study this problem, it is true that the majority of these mass shooters are angry young men, but there are hundreds of millions of angry young men around the world -- tens of millions of angry young men. Most of them don’t shoot. It doesn’t help us just to identify -- and the majority of people who have mental illnesses are not shooters. So we can’t sort through and identify ahead of time who might take actions like this. The only thing we can do is make sure that they can’t have an entire arsenal when something snaps in them.

And if we’re going to do something about that, the politics has to change. The politics has to change. And the people who are troubled by this have to be as intense and as organized and as adamant about this issue as folks on the other side who are absolutists and think that any gun safety measures are somehow an assault on freedom, or communistic -- or a plot by me to takeover and stay in power forever or something. (Laughter.) I mean, there are all kinds of crackpot conspiracy theories that float around there -- some of which, by the way, are ratified by elected officials in the other party on occasion.

Here was Obama on Chicago:

And I’m deeply saddened about what happened yesterday. But Arne is going back to Chicago -- let’s not forget, this is happening every single day in forgotten neighborhoods around the country. Every single day. Kids are just running for their lives, trying to get to school. Broderick, when we were down in New Orleans, sitting down with a group of young men, when we were talking about Katrina, and I’ve got two young men next to me, both of them had been shot multiple times. They were barely 20.

So we got to make a decision. If we think that’s normal, then we have to own it. I don’t think it’s normal. I think it’s abnormal. I think we should change it. But I can’t do it by myself.

Yeah, we are going to get guns off the streets of Chicago without arresting any young black men, or even ruffling their feathers. Obama is right - he can't do that by himself.